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Review: Tremendum, Augustum

Leonore Wilson’s Tremendum, Augustum (AldrichPress 2014) is a wonderful poetry collection, and a remarkable poetry collection. Like a Brahms symphonic movement, I know that there is power and substance here even if I am not fully able to grasp it. And who wants to bother with poetry that you can fully grasp at one reading? Well, yes, you are right, most people. But immediate understanding is not the point of good poetry. Nor are new ideas and new ways of seeing immediately understandable. I started reading this book of poems six months ago, and have

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November 19, 2014

“TERROR MONSTERS IN THE CROSSHAIRS!”

“TERROR MONSTERS IN THE CROSSHAIRS!” That sounds like a ludicrous 1950s Hollywood B-movie, and I can almost see the lurid poster, with its determined hero clenching his jaw, the buxom starlet lifting her hands in fear, and the hideous, outsized monster menacing the planet. But this is not a poster. It is the splashy New York Daily News headline announcing US air strikes against Islamic State in Syria. Naturally, this attack is a violation not just of common sense and experience, but of international law. President Obama ‘s morning-after speech did not apparently even invoke

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September 23, 2014

No good will come of this: Obama’s speech on Islamic State

President Obama has promised air attacks in Syria, and increased air attacks in Iraq. He sounded disturbingly like President Bush in his September 10th national address, optimistically announcing deeper American involvement in the chaos of Iraq and Syria. “We will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL” Degrade, sure. Destroy one organization whose name will probably change anyway, maybe. But destroy militant Islam with airstrikes? Not gonna happen. When Obama promised to destroy Islamic State, his listeners surely took him to mean not just this one enemy, but whatever powerful, armed Islamic forces threaten our perceived interests

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September 12, 2014

Review: The Trip to Italy

Josh Long’s review of The Trip to Italy (2014) on the website Battleship Pretension calls the film “a feast to the eyes, uproariously funny, and keenly introspective.” I’ll go along with the “feast for the eyes” here, but I can’t agree that The Trip to Italy was uproariously funny. Funny, yes. And I certainly can’t agree that it was “keenly introspective.” I think the film shows two high achieving, insecure, ungenerous,”friends” in a series of witty conversations in which they try to one-up each other. The few bumps into serious topics (e.g. mortality, failure, loneliness,

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September 11, 2014

August jobs report: good news and bad news

Two articles in the Sept. 8, 2014, The Wall Street Journal are interesting when read together. 1. Grocery chains and food companies are struggling. Why? Walmart says consumers are concerned with “depressed wages and cuts in federal benefits.” Roundy’s (a mid-west grocery chain) says that the grocery and food businesses are suffering decreased profits because consumers have less food money. Campbell (soups) says “consumers are struggling with underemployment and rising costs.” Kraft says consumer demand is persistently weak in part because “more people are falling into the low-income status.” But that is not bad news

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September 11, 2014

No, Brian M. Welke, the Iraq War was not “worth it.”

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, an Iraq War veteran tells readers the answer he gives to people who ask whether that war “was worth it.” Depending on who is asking, this question might be about the veteran’s own participation, but most often it is probably about American foreign policy. Was the war worth the cost in lives, national debt, and catastrophic unintended consequences? But the op-ed writer, Brian M. Welke, hears the question as being about his own participation. Fair enough. Was all that death and loss worth it for Brian M. Welke?

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September 5, 2014

Film Review: Ai Wei Wei: The Fake Case

Like all humans, yet far more obviously than most, Ai Wei Wei exists in some indefinable middle ground between being free and being under house arrest. That is true of his life in general, but especially as he waits out probation as depicted in Ai Wei Wei: the Fake Case. In this documentary he appears wary and guarded when talking about restrictions on his ability to speak with foreigners about his own case, let alone about conditions in China. Ai Wei Wei does address both matters before the camera, and while his opinions are probably

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May 26, 2014

Film review: Blue Jasmine

Unlike some actual film critics, I think that Blue Jasmine by Woody Allen is not a film about the 1% and 99%, even though we see two strata of society banging into each other. I believe the film is primarily about deceit. In looking at a film or play, we might ask what force or fissure threatens stasis, order, continuity, happiness. In horror films the threat might be a radioactive Martian zombie cheerleader, but in serious drama, the problem is usually within human nature. In Blue Jasmine, the force continually threatening order and stability seems

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March 28, 2014

Review: Camouflage for the Neighborhood

Unlike most books of poetry, which are collections of separate poems ignoring each other like subway commuters, Lorene Delany-Ullman’s Camouflage for the Neighborhood is better understood, in fact only understood, as a single coherent work, the whole being far greater than the sum of its parts. Collectively the 71 prose poems (or paragraphs) form a collage of anecdotal memories and asides expressed by a woman, 55 or so years old, whose life in Southern California was touched, quietly and softly, and continually, by America’s wars, by our preparations for wars, and by our anodyne acceptance

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March 25, 2014

Review: Inside Llewyn Davis

In keeping with Ethan and Joel Coen’s dark whimsy, and their ambivalent fascination with losers and failures, Inside Llewyn Davis is a sort of reverse-image, anti-heroic Odyssey. Like Odysseus, who laboriously island-hops homeward after total war against Troy, the homeless and broke Davis moves uncomfortably from couch to couch as charitable acquaintances let him crash for a day or two at a time. Actually, “crashing” seems a more apt description of his daily life than his nights. Odysseus’s voyage finally begins because of his brilliant if belated success at Troy, but Davis’s journey arises from

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February 25, 2014
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